David Wilson - Hallowed Ground

The man-thing lunged to one side. It rose half out of the pit, and Creed reeled back, biting his lip hard to prevent any sound from escaping. Where the man’s torso should have met hips and leg, nothing but charred trailing guts and blood dangled. One of the crow men lashed out with his stick, and the thing tumbled back, an almost surprised grimace of pain crossing its ruined features.

Creed didn’t know what to do. He knew he was no match for the three. Together with Brady he'd barely managed to chase them off. They were like a pack of crows – chase them out of your field all you wanted, they’d just circle and come back. He didn’t know what that thing in the pit was either, though he suspected that – at least at some point in its existence –it had more in common with him than the others. There was nothing he could do to help, but he couldn’t just stand there and watch it being tortured and burned.

He reeled away from the translucent barrier as a heart-chilling cry broke like shattering ice over the clearing. In the silence between heartbeats a huge shadow enveloped everything, snuffing the light from the fire and plunging the world into utter, impenetrable darkness.

Creed staggered back and hit the wall. He winced as the cold, icy pain tore through his body. He opened his eyes again. The darkness was gone, only the pain remained. No, he realized, a tall willowish woman stood beside the fire-pit. She glared down into it contemptuously. Creed’s hand slid instinctively toward the six-shooters on his hip. He tried to slow his suddenly rapsing breath. His hand shook. He gritted his teeth and pulled the gun. The woman turned her head slightly and looked right at him. She shook her head, just once, very slightly.

"I wouldn’t do that if I were you," a voice said inside his head. The crow men fell away before her in a flutter of dark clothing and shuffling feet. If she frightened them, Creed wanted no part of her. So far, she hadn’t told them he was nearby, and he thought – for some odd reason – that this was reassuring. He holstered the gun.

She turned toward the camp and strode up to the shimmering barrier. It brought her closer to Creed. He backed away step after stumbling step as she neared. She didn’t acknowledge his presence at all. When she reached the wall of light she placed her hand flat against it and scowled. Luminous rings rippled out from her fingertips along that transparent surface. For a dozen feet either side of her the barrier was suddenly lit by a bluish glow. Stepping closer, she placed her other hand beside the first. And pushed.

A jag of blue light arced down from somewhere far above and sheered through the barrier between her outstretched hands. Creed watched, fascinated. The fault in the otherwise perfect surface pulsed angrily. The crow men let their poles dangle, taking only random pokes at the wretch struggling weakly in the fire pit. They focused all of their attention on the woman. Miniscule fissures rippled out from the fault, breaking the barrier open inch by inch. The whole thing reminded Creed of ice on a river – though it had been years since he’d seen water freeze.

The three crow men turned to the fire and jabbed violently with their poles. It was, Creed thought, as though a single thought controlled them. They speared the wretch in the blaze from three sides, the red hot iron tips driving deep though his charred living corpse, and lifted him above the fire. They held his writhing body easily.

Creed was torn. Did he watch the crow men or the woman? He thought about Brady, and Silas. He thought about the woman whose locket he wore.

The crack widened. The barrier screamed like a living thing. The sound was worse than any death rattle he had heard.

Creed saw things – faces, hands, oddly elongated bodies that glowed and writhed, trying to make their way to the widening rift. Something held them back. It was as if the woman had opened a hole and rolled the edges back, forming a wall. The fissure was narrow at first, but widened slowly.

When Creed looked back toward the fire the crow men turned toward him. For a heart-stopping moment he thought they had seen him, but they weren’t looking at him, they were staring at the woman’s back. Whatever was going on in that camp, he wasn’t going to be able to do anything if he was stuck on the wrong side of the barrier. That said, he couldn’t believe the woman, or the crow men, breaking their way through was a good thing, either. All he could do was watch as she tore the fault wider. When it was wide enough for a man to slip through, he made his move.

Keeping low to the ground, he ran, hard, fast, parallel to the fire. He had his gun in his hand before he took the first step. It was habit. Even though he knew on a gut level it was useless, it felt good to hold it. The first of the crow men started to turn as he drew level with the fire. Creed spun and fired from the hip.

Three shots.

Each bullet caught a crow man full in the face, splitting bone and feather as they went in deep. That single second of gunplay was without doubt some of the best shooting he’d ever managed, but he didn’t have time to savor it. They staggered, and the poles they were using to brace the wretched thing between them shivered. One of the iron tips tore free, unbalancing all three crow men. As one, they loosed a horrifying screech – it was halfway between the cry of an eagle and the laughing bray of a hyena.

The woman, as though startled, turned a fraction casting a backward glance over her shoulder. Creed didn’t hesitate. He charged at her. At the last possible moment, as she raised her hands to protect herself, he threw himself to the side, scrabbled in the dust and, even as she twisted, hurled himself headlong into the gaping fault she’d opened in the barrier. With a scream of rage she clawed at him, but that broke her contact with the shimmering wall and the fault sealed itself in an explosion of light and sound.

On the other side Creed scrambled to his feet and turned back, guns raised. He saw the woman staring at him in fury, and then her expression changed. Of all things, she smiled. Then, with no warning, she threw back her head and laughed. The sound was distorted by the barrier. For a moment it sounded eerily like a parliament of owls screeching.

Creed turned his back on her. She was on the other side of the barrier and as much effort as it had taken her to open that one crack, he was pretty sure there was nothing she or her bird men could do to hurt him through it. He crouched low and started into the Deacon’s camp. Heart pounding, he started out around a row of camp wagons and headed for the back of the great tent. Whatever was going down in there, he didn’t think it was going to be long before things started to get interesting.

He wanted a good seat.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Lilith strode to the fire and pushed the nearest of the crow men aside contemptuously. She stared down at the wretched, struggling carcass that was all that remained of their prisoner. She pulled a small pouch from the folds of her long, dark dress and teased it open. She took a pinch of powder and – blowing on it once – she sprinkled it over the fire.

The thing in the pit stiffened. Its skin crackled, grew as red as the coal feeding the flames that tormented it, and blackened. As the undead, pleading eyes stared up at her from the fire, the earthly remains of Benjamin Jamieson fell away to ash.

Seconds later, the pit was cold and dead – nothing but blackened soot remained. The woman pulled out a larger pouch, leaned down, and very carefully scooped the cinders from the pit. She let them fall through her fingers and into the pouch. When she was done, she sealed the drawstrings and touched the leather to her lips before handing it to the nearest of the crow men. It nodded, taking the pouch from her. The feathers had reformed around the wound in its face, leaving no trace of the damage caused by Creed’s lead.